


falling is like this

by coldhope



Series: The Second Law [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Coping Mechanisms, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Movie Night, Multi, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Second Law, Waiting for the Winter universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 13:13:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2548742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After <i>Waiting for the Winter</i>, the dreams don't stop, but at least they don't all have to bear them alone. Pepper, Tony, Bucky, and Steve find a way to make the best of the recurring nightmares that involves salted caramel popcorn and <i>Plan 9 from Outer Space</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	falling is like this

**Author's Note:**

> One of a series of vignettes set in the _Waiting for the Winter_ verse. Thanks again to specialshera and rainbowbarnacle for beta reading.

_I'm sorry I can't help you, I cannot keep you safe_  
 _I'm sorry I can't help myself, so don't look at me that way_  
 _we can't fight gravity on a planet that insists_  
 _that love is like falling_  
 _and falling is like this_  
\--Ani DiFranco

~

The second or third time it happens they recognize the inevitability of everything, and stop trying to pretend it doesn't happen. It's not the Midnight Can't Sleep Club; it's the Gravity Sucks Club, or perhaps the Nightmares About Falling Don't Actually Seem To Stop, Ever, Club.

They find one another awake at odd hours. Perhaps providently, perhaps by accident, it seems most often to be the watchers or the fallers who can't sleep at the same time. Tony and Steve, Pepper and Bucky. After the first solid month of it, trading guilt and imagined responsibility and unhappy wordless looks among the four of them, Tony finally says it. 

"Next time," he tells them in the morning, two out of the four heavy-eyed and headachy as if they'd been carousing rather than dreaming of horrors gone past, "next time, we make it into something else. So okay, we can't help being woken up by this shit, but once we're up...we don't have to go on with the dreaming."

"What are you suggesting?" Steve asks. He always looks the worst after these nights, for some reason; Bucky can get away with extra-haggard because he has never really embraced the clean-shaven wholesome look (and the hair does its work nicely as a curtain), Pepper can and does use makeup, and Tony always looks strung-out on something or other, whether it be adrenaline or chemicals or raw rasping imagination. But Steve, who can't lie to save his life, whose eyes speak volumes even if he's trying super hard to keep them quiet, Steve always looks miserably exhausted, too pale, almost feverish, after a night of watching the train's railing give way and seeing Bucky tumbling out of his reach. 

"Movie night," Tony says. "Or s'mores and whiskey, I don't care. Something other than just sort of moping at one another and going 'so these dreams sure do suck, huh'."

Steve gives him an unconvinced look, but Bucky just nods. "I'm in. We could play board games and I could kick everybody's ass."

"Oh, come on, Red Scare. You cannot possibly hope to beat me at Monopoly. Seriously. I am, like, the human equivalent of the Monopoly moneybags guy, only orders of magnitude sexier and also a genius at engineering. Also, no pinstripe trousers with cutaway coats. Ever."

"Big words, Stark." Bucky tucks hair behind his ear, leans over to nudge Steve. "What do you say? Make the best of this shit when it happens, cause none of us can stop it happening?"

Steve looks across the table at Pepper, who has done her work well with concealer and highlighter but whose eyes still show the faint traces of the night's misery. "Pepper? What do you think?"

"I think that if Mr. Stark has his heart set on something, that thing is going to happen," she says, and takes a long sip of her coffee. "But you might include Thor."

"Huh?" Bucky says. 

"Oh. Right, yeah, long-ass story is long-ass, but he had a watching-somebody-fall thing too. I dunno if gods get nightmares." Tony shrugs. "Still not really sure what the deal is with Reindeer Games, if he's all the way dead or just mostly dead or...how does that work with gods?"

"Tony," says Pepper, and he just shrugs again. She turns to the others. "Yes, Thor has nightmares. When he's staying here, I think we ought to include him in any support-group movie nights if he wants to participate."

Bucky looks a question at Steve, who gives him a little nod: _I'll tell you later._ "Okay," he says. "But who gets to pick the movie, is the real important question."

~

"Who the hell picked this movie?" he demands.

"You know perfectly well it was Tony's turn," Pepper says, curling up beside him on the couch and handing over the popcorn bowl. Bucky has never gotten used to how much sugar the modern world puts in everything, but there's this one weird combination of caramel and salt that he absolutely cannot get enough of, and Pepper is the only one who gets the proportions right when making salted-caramel popcorn. He goes on grumbling, but there's no rancor in it. 

"I think he does it to fuck with us," Bucky says, after a while, licking his fingers. "How does one man have this many terrible movies in his possession?"

"Mr. Stark has his little ways. But I kind of have to admit this one is particularly terrible. What were the other eight plans that failed before this one?"

Bucky starts to elucidate exactly what is wrong with Plan 9 from every possible tactical angle. Pepper leans against his shoulder and listens on one level, but mostly just enjoys the comfort of hearing him talk; when he really gets going on something, the Brooklyn comes out to play, and she finds it not only stupidly endearing but also somehow soothing.

They had talked about Extremis, after the Hydra debacle. Talked about exactly what had been done to her, and how she had borne it, how she had dealt with and accepted it and gone on with her life, or tried to. Pepper wasn't sure at first how to parse his expression after she was done describing it, and then she realized that the expression seemed odd because she had never seen it pointed at anybody other than Steve Rogers: a mixture of worry, sympathy, and awe. "It was easier for me," she'd told him. "I knew who I was the whole time, they...they didn't take that away from me, and it only lasted a matter of, what, days, before the end came and Tony got me treatment to help deal with the effects."

"I dunno if it's worse _knowing_ who you are while they make you do things. At least...well, at least I didn't have the awareness of doing them until after. Are you _sure_ all the people involved in doing that to you are either dead or in custody?"

"Pretty sure, why?"

"I'd like to meet them," Bucky had said, with a cold edge on the words. "I would like to meet them and have a real personal up-close talk about what they did."

"Tell you what, if any of them surface, after Tony's done with them, I would be _glad_ for you to initiate a discussion."

He'd been sharp, stiff, angular, for a moment longer, and then just sighed and pushed the hair out of his face. "Rather have the first shot, but I guess I can live with that."

~

"...this is so Bucky's idea," Steve says, watching Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery Baldwinning and Connering at one another in a stolen Russian submarine. "This is absolutely Bucky's idea and I am betting you anything that Pepper aided and abetted him."

"Shhh, Rogers. This is a good bit."

"Seriously? This thing with the, what, the spooky soundless magnetowhatever drive, is that even possible?"

"Not the way they have it performing, no, but shh, this is the touching bit with Sam Neill, don't make me have to skip back or I am gonna find something fucking horrific for you to watch next time, and do not even get me started on factual inaccuracy in movie science because I will literally never shut up, ever, and nobody wants that."

~

Everything is always tinted blue-grey in this memory. It's like a particularly deep-grooved phonograph record, each time he relives it grinding the image a little deeper, pushing it a little further. They're on the train, the white-and-black Alps flaring and flickering by outside the windows, and there is a firefight, like so many other firefights, and then Bucky has snatched up his shield and is facing the Hydra soldier carrying the equivalent of a fucking blue-lit cannon in his arms and the Hydra fires and Bucky catches the bolt on the shield and is flung back and then there is a vast howling open space where half the train car's wall used to be, peeled back like an anchovy tin's lid by the force of the Hydra weapon; and then everything slows down, the way it always does, images frozen in slow thick glass so that he can't help but see them in perfect clarity. Bucky, hanging from the railing, reaching out to him, still a terrible space between them. His own gloved hand reaching out, and still reaching even as the bolts holding the remains of the railing pull free and take Bucky down with them, diminishing so fast, dwindling, gone in the blink of a tear-blurred eye as Steve clings to the side of the train and fights the urge, the powerful urge, to just let go as well. It is almost the hardest thing he has ever had to do, to hang on to the swaying structure of the train car, to stop himself from following Bucky down into the black. 

He doesn't even realize he's sitting up in bed, shivering, breath coming in high shrill gasps, trying to draw air through a throat that feels closed down to a pinhole: all he can see is that ravine and the shrinking speck that is Bucky vanishing beyond his reach. Then there are arms around him, somebody is holding him steady while a firm hand rubs between his shoulderblades, a voice settles over him. He coughs, ragged and painful. "It's okay, Steve," the voice is saying, somewhere beyond the dregs of panic. "It's okay, it's just a dream, Stevie, I got you, c'mon, breathe."

Little by little the train goes away again, and he can see the familiar shapes of their darkened bedroom, and turns to rest his face against Bucky's neck and wait for his heart to slow. "Let you fall," he says, the way he always says it. His chest hurts.

"You didn't let me fall, that was Isaac fuckin' Newton, Steve, there was nothing you could've done. It's okay. It's over, it's done with, just the bad dream left now." Bucky is still rubbing his back, warm reassuring circles that slowly make the painful tightness let go. "Christ, you always feel like you're running a temperature when this happens. I wish Banner could do something to make it stop."

"Me too," Steve says almost inaudibly, lips moving against Bucky's skin. "I bet...he wishes he could make his own dreams stop as well."

"Yeah, okay, point." Bucky just hugs him crossly. "You think you can sleep again?"

"No." It's faster, louder than he'd actually meant. 

"Figured. Me neither. C'mon, time to go make unhealthy foods and see what Stark has cued up on the Bad Dreams Can Bite Me list."

~

It may not be the healthiest of coping mechanisms; it may not be the most progressive and useful approach to dealing with the fallout of their various lives and not-lives. But at least all of them know that they're not alone in the dreams; all of them know that while it's miserable, it's misery that does not have to be hidden, that can be borne together instead of individually, alone. 

Bucky isn't sure when he realizes that he has begun to love them, too. Love them the way he loved the Howling Commandos, people with whom he'd been into battle, people he trusted to have his back no matter what. The thought brings no terror, as it might have done just a little while ago. These people--all of them, but particularly Tony and Pepper and Steve--all have memories of falling, and of helplessly watching people fall. _Shared life experience_ , Steve had said. It may not be wonderful, but it is real, and it is more of a sense of _belonging_ than he has felt since gravity took him in 1945.

_you can't fight gravity on a planet that insists_  
 _that love is like falling and_  
 _falling is like this_


End file.
